Want quick knowledge? Visit the children’s section

Monday, April 29, 2019

Here’s a unposed stack of books I found on our coffee table over the weekend. (When we have obsessions around here, we give in to them, completely, and feed them many, many books.)

I often think about how the kids’ books do a better job of informing and entertaining on various subjects, so I got a kick out of this bit from Jeopardy champion James Holzhauer, who admits he was “never a diligent student”:

I have a strategy of reading children’s books to gain knowledge. I’ve found that in an adult reference book, if it’s not a subject I’m interested in, I just can’t get into it.

I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children’s section.

Another Jeopardy connection: the Ken Jennings books illustrated by Mike Lowery are a big hit with our nonfiction-loving six-year-old.

(via @mattthomas)

Phones smash, notebooks bend

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Robert Macfarlane shares the notebooks he accumulated while working on Underland, and why he sticks with paper:

People sometimes ask me why I don’t use a phone to take notes when I’m ‘out’ in the field. The answer is that phones smash, while notebooks bend. I also like the way that notebooks record where they’ve been not just in terms of what’s written in them, but also in terms of the wear they bear as objects.

In a wonderful thread on Twitter, Alastair Humphreys shared one of his, soggy from the field:

Here’s one of my own notebooks, which got soaked while encountering the wilds of my washing machine:

And elsewhere on Twitter, user @bernoid shared their nature journal to much fanfare. (They take a hybrid digital/analog approach: Photos out in the field, drawings later in the notebook.)

https://twitter.com/bernoid/status/1121778177771220997

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Paper is a woonderful technology.

Papa’s home (for now)

Saturday, April 27, 2019

We’re half way through this tour. When I agreed to do 25 cities, neither my wife or I quite anticipated the toll it would take. Last time I did a 20-city tour for the journal, Owen was 3 and Jules was just six months old. Rough, but doable. This time, Owen is 6 and Jules is 4, and it’s just a whole different level of hard on every one of us.

This weekend we’re trying to squeeze all the time together in that we can. Owen asked me to get out my old Tascam Portastudio and teach him how to record on tape. I told him I wanted an engineering credit for my expertise, and he made me this:

Jules is just happy to have his crew back together, and spent a good part of the afternoon drawing The Three Little Pigs.

We have had great turnouts on tour and I’m grateful to everyone who’s come out. But right now I do not want to get back on a plane Tuesday morning! (Been thinking a lot about the documentary The Other F Word.)

“Daddy’s Home” …for now.

My office for the day

Thursday, April 25, 2019

My hotel didn’t have my room ready when I arrived, so the fabulous librarians at the Richmond Public Library let me hang out in their board room and work this afternoon. I like these digs!

Youth Spies and Curious Elders

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Not too long ago, I was hanging out at my friend Josh’s house, and his son Oliver was explaining the video game Fortnite to us.

“Isn’t the object of the game just to kill people?” Josh asked.

“No, dad,” Oliver replied, “the object of the game is to stay alive.”

I immediately thought of John Waters’ Make Trouble:

[A]s you get older, you’ll need youth spies that will keep you abreast of new music that nobody your age has heard of yet or body-piercing mutilations that are becoming all the rage—even budding sexually transmitted diseases you should go to any length to avoid.

He’s made this joke in lots of places, but here he is underscoring the heart of the joke: his insistence on holding onto is his curiosity:

I have youth spies, people that report to me and I give them poppers for good information. But mostly I’m still interested in life. I don’t think it was better when I was young. I think the kids that are 15 and getting into trouble are having as much fun as I did. So I’m still curious. I don’t have fear of flying. I have fear of not flying. Always thinking that tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday.

Waters is what I call a Curious Elder — someone who manages to retain their curiosity as they age and stays interested in what young people are up to. The curious elder isn’t interested in judging youth, they’re interested in learning from them.

For the Curious Elder, “The kids are alright” isn’t an observation, it’s an attitude.

I do wonder sometimes if it’s easier to maintain this attitude if you aren’t a parent. Then again, there’s Brian Eno, a Curious Elder and parent, who I remember telling a lovely story about his daughter playing him Portishead’s “The Rip” in the car and becoming obsessed with it. Here is Eno on approaching the future with the attitude of a Curious Elder:

The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future. Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.

Emphasis mine. Revel in your mystification!

And of course, the flip side is true for youth: Be curious about what came before you and spend time listening to and learning from your elders — there’s a lot of wisdom and experience they have to share…